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Serving in the Kentucky Army National Guard, Nicholasville's Chris Campbell, a master sergeant, and Catherine Corson, a sergeant first class, understand what it means to sacrifice.
“You see the posts on Facebook that say, “Thank you for your service” or “Thank you for your sacrifice,” but members of the military generally have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into,” Campbell said. “I think the biggest service and sacrifice is on the part of families. That’s the part that really gets to me more than anything else, (and) that’s to see my son not want to talk to me on (Skype) because he’s missing me. That was difficult.”
With his voice quivering, Campbell, 42, who returned stateside from a year long tour in Afghanistan, spoke from the heart.
A single mother of three, Corson, 35, echoed Campbell’s thoughts on the sacrifice on family.
“On one hand, it’s very rewarding — we actually do a lot of good things there — it does take a toll on your family,” she said. “Your kids grow up virtually overnight, it feels like. There are so many changes. When I left, I had a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 13-year-old. And when I come back, all of the sudden I have a high-schooler, a third-grader and a kindergartner.”
Corson’s former husband is a military member, which makes the adjustment for her three children — two boys and a daughter — that much harder.
“So it’s very hard to have dual military parents for a child,” Corson said. “Fortunately for us, they put us on separate deployment schedules and they worked with us very well, and we’re in the same unit, and it happens to be that we’re great friends.”
Campbell and Corson are members of the Kentucky National Guard ADT IV unit based out of Frankfort, and once deployed to Afghanistan, the mission was to help that nation solidify its economy.
“We were an agribusiness development team,” Campbell said. “The people in Afghanistan know how to grow things; that’s not an issue. What they need is they need help getting that agricultural knowledge translated into an economy — in other words, something that they can use to produce money, sustain themselves and not be reliant on the Taliban.”
Corson said one of the most difficult aspects of the deployment was simply helping Afghanistan’s people with their irrigation issues.
“That’s the shortfall that they have — their irrigation,” Corson said.
Another shortcoming the Afghan people have is knowledge passed down from generation to generation, Corson said.
“It’s a war-torn area,” she said. “We learn from our grandfathers who learned from their grandfathers. Well, their grandfathers were killed at such a young age, they don’t have that.”
While their mission was secondary to active battle fronts, the danger was always there, Campbell said.
“I didn’t get fired at directly. I kid everybody and tell them it was because of my awesome mustache, but quite honestly, I had people praying for me here, and that was why I didn’t get shot at,” he said.
Campbell recalled once when he and another person went to help an Afghan man with his watermelon crop that was suffering disease. After helping the man, Campbell learned a stark truth about the area he was in.
“Come to find out later, we had taken soil samples in an IED belt; it was a place they had found IEDs (improvised explosive devices) laying around,” he said. “The risk is always there.”
Campbell said the chilling reality of working in a combat zone was many times a glance upward at his base.
“It was tough and there are trials that you go through, but honestly, I was lucky. There were more than 26 people in the 82nd Airborne that were there for six months during the summer — during the fighting season. There were over 26 people that lost their lives there,” he said. “Every day we watched the choppers come in and out, and 42 people lost limbs out of that group.”
Corson said intelligence-gathering also helped curb the potential dangers.
“We did a really good job at trying to be safe, and we had a really good intel sergeant, so we were able to know when we could move and things like that,” Corson said. “Being there, there’s always dangers; there is always a chance of (getting attacked), and there’s always a chance of getting shot at when you’re outside the wire (off the base).”
Presently, both Campbell — a lieutenant with the Nicholasville Fire Department — and Corson — a full-time active guard reserve — are now adjusting to life stateside.
Campbell said his time in the war-torn country helped him look at things much differently and it has been an adjustment now that he’s back in the states.
“There’s people over there that have little kids in these villages that are running around about half naked in this (30-degree) weather, and they’ll eat a little smidgen of something every day and they’re happy; that’s their way of life,” Campbell said. “We’re over here, and because our wireless Internet goes down, or the cable TV won’t pick up the game you want to watch, we’re having a fit and the blood pressure is going out the roof.
“My favorite adjustment is simply being able to sit in my own bathroom and not have to go to a port-a-potty. Most soldiers over there on these FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) are having to use campground-type facilities, something you’d only use by necessity in a remote situation here.”
Being in the military, there is always a chance the two will be called once again to serve their country overseas. But Campbell, a 23-year veteran, says his “touring” days are over.
“Unless there’s some unforeseen issue that comes up — it would have to be a pretty drastic issue,” Campbell said. “That was a kind of a mandate from (his wife) Dixie. We came to this agreement in the midst of our deployment that we’re not doing this again.”
Corson, a 17-year veteran, agreed.
“I volunteered for both deployments, so my hope is that I won’t have to go back before I retire,” she said. “I am very proud to serve my country, and not everyone gets the chance to do that.”
Corson said while the sacrifice of serving is great, it’s also worth it.
“Even though the sacrifice of leaving our children and our families is very great, the time we’ve given to them is invaluable,” she said.